Get Ready: The New Unilateralism

The New York Times does it again.  Another op-ed from the left.  Despite attempts, has the NYTimes ever published an op-ed from someone, not an elected politician or government official, supporting the viewpoint that Israel has a right and need to be in Judea and Samaria, and Gaza, and to contruct communities there?

Well, today, we have "Peace Without Partners" from Ami Ayalon, Orni Petruschka and Gilead Sher (Ayalon is a former commander of the Israeli Navy and head of the Israeli domestic security agency and a failed politician, Orni Petruschka is an entrepreneur (?!), and Sher was a peace negotiator and chief of staff to Prime Minister Barak from 1999 to 2001.


Excerpts:


...Israel doesn’t need to wait for a final-status deal with the Palestinians. What it needs is a radically new unilateral approach: It should set the conditions for a territorial compromise based on the principle of two states for two peoples, which is essential for Israel’s future as both a Jewish and a democratic state.


Israel can and must take constructive steps to advance the reality of two states based on the 1967 borders, with land swaps — regardless of whether Palestinian leaders have agreed to accept it. Through a series of unilateral actions, gradual but tangible changes could begin to transform the situation on the ground.


That is a recipe for disaster, see: Unilateral Disengagement and Yossi Beilin:


"The greatest risk underlying unilateral action is the strengthening of extremists," wrote Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli justice minister and one of the architects of the Geneva Accord, an unofficial peace plan.
Israel...should create a plan to help 100,000 settlers who live east of the barrier to relocate within Israel’s recognized borders. That plan would not take full effect before a peace agreement was in place.


But, what "recognized borders"?  If unilateral and, regardless if the Pals. accept it, ...are they crazy?


...Israel should also enact a voluntary evacuation, compensation and absorption law for settlers east of the fence...


Can we do so to Arabs west of the new "recognized borders"?  Why not?


Our organization, Blue White Future, holds regular meetings with settlers. We have found that many would move voluntarily if the government renounced its sovereign claims to the West Bank, because they would see no future for themselves there.

Actually, that sounds like the Black-and-Blue Future.

Critics will argue that unilateral moves by Israel have been failures — notably the hasty withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which left settlers homeless and allowed Hamas to move into the vacuum and launch rockets into Israel. But we can learn lessons from those mistakes. Under our proposal, the Israeli Army would remain in the West Bank until the conflict was officially resolved with a final-status agreement. And Israel would not physically force its citizens to leave until an agreement was reached, even though preparations would begin well before such an accord.


Oh, they read my mind.  Have they read the Pals' minds?  No way will that be acceptable to the other side.  Have they read Hamas' latest "we won't accept a [peace treaty" statement?
And after reading this, ask youselves, out of 360,000 Jewish resident revenants in Yesha, how many are the "many" of whom they write?

We don’t expect the most ideologically motivated settlers to support this plan, since their visions for Israel’s future differ radically from ours. But as a result of our discussions and seminars with settlers of all stripes, we believe that many of them recognize that people with different visions are no less Zionist than they are. We have learned that we must be candid about our proposed plan, discuss the settlers’ concerns and above all not demonize them. They are the ones who would pay the price of being uprooted from their homes and also from their deeply felt mission of settling the land.


There's more but it is platidudinal prose.  No logic, no realpolitik.


Too bad the NYTimes wastes column inches on such.

^

Quotable Words

The demand for a cessation of settlement construction will have no impact on the political process as long as they are not telling the Israeli and Palestinian public what will happen with the half-million Israelis who already live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. How many of them will have to be evacuated? How much money will this cost and who will pay for it? Evacuating 7,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip cost more than NIS 10 billion.

Even if only 100,000 Jews are evacuated from the West Bank the move will cost, on the basis of this estimate, some NIS 150 billion - about 50 percent of the national budget for an entire year. It is true that it amounts to "only" about 8 percent of the cost of the American war in Iraq to date, and maybe for the sake of peace in the Middle East the U.S. administration would be willing to invest another 8 percent in the area, but someone in Washington must articulate this clearly.

Zvi Bar'el

Netanyahu - For The Record: No Evacuation/Dismantlement

Netanyahu: I'm not bound by Olmert pledges, won't evacuate settlements


Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he would not be bound by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's commitments to evacuate West Bank settlements and withdraw from the territories.

"I will not keep Olmert's commitments to withdraw and I won't evacuate settlements. Those understandings are invalid and unimportant," Netanyahu said.

Oh My. Evacuation? Razing?

Israel can't even halt 15 solidarity internationalists from inflitrating by sea in Gaza but defeatist wishy-washy politicians can shoot off their mouths so:

Following the renewal of Kassam rocket fire on Israeli communities in the Western Negev, the cabinet on Tuesday is set to discuss a new strategy of using heavy artillery in retaliatory strikes.

According to a proposal made jointly by Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann and Vice Premier Haim Ramon, the IDF will evacuate villages that have become launching pads for Hamas and other terror groups and will then raze the villages with artillery, Army Radio reported.

The station reported that in such cases, the military would notify the Gaza villagers' civilian residents in advance that they must evacuate.

Evacuation and razing is for the Jews of Gush Katif. Who do these politicians think we know they are?

And Who Else Could Be Evacuated?

The headline reads:

Peres: Israel could evacuate dozens of West Bank settlements

And Reuters reports:

Israel could remove dozens of Jewish settlements from the West Bank, Vice Premier Shimon Peres told Channel Two television on Saturday, but warned that "not all the settlements, and I'm not even sure most of the settlements," would be evacuated.

The number of settlements evacuated could be in the dozens, he said. "I think that a serious effort will be made to do that which we undertook to do, which is removing settlements."

And since this is Medad's MyRightWord blog, who just know what the answer is to my question of who else could be evacuated.

Right?